Dragonfly: A Tale of the Counter-Earth at the Cosmic Antipodes (3 page)

4 Soaring

The creeping death lay in a band that stretched from east to west across the constellation of wells, seeping slowly beneath the desert. But the springs to southward were still like emeralds strewn over the flats. I followed them to keep my water replenished.

It brought terror to my heart to soar as I did, higher than any living creature I kenned. A snapped ferule, a stopped cog would mean my swift descent and death. But more than this I exalted to see the earth spread like a map below me, to feel the freedom of the air. It was an exultation shot through with fear, for high spirits go before a fall. Though I longed to spiral up toward the sun itself, I knew that this would be to leave the path of wisdom, and held to my level course.

I regained the canyon two days after setting out, upstream from where I’d left it the first time. It was broad and deep, with red-black walls and flat-topped fins. The fossil city of Urgit climbed up terraces on either side. The ribbed stone riverbed held pools of clear water. There had been no wells that morning, so I spiraled down to where it trickled from trough to trough before disappearing beneath a bed of shoals to the south, and there filled my skins.

Now I needed a place to launch my flier. A big dome with a cupola beyond the eastern bank looked to afford an easy ascent. I took the machine apart and carried it up the ruined bridge and through the gate.

A great plaza with a dry fountain lay just inside, surrounded by buildings like giant stone blocks. Streets ran away from it in every direction. I set my craft down on the pavement and went to explore the widest way.

It was a dark and winding defile of carved stone, with shadow-hung doorways opening on either side like square caves, and paintings of hoplites in formation and cataphracts on clawed schyrothim. The acrid odor of maugreth dens tainted the air.

The street emerged upon a terrace at the base of the cliffs, where a fissure in the side of the canyon was fronted with a pillared portico. I went up the steps and entered the old darkness.

The nave within was a huge crack with rough natural walls that met overhead in a series of pointed arches. The floor had been filled in and leveled. A dais with a stone altar occupied the inner end, beyond which a wall reached from one side of the crevice to the other. High in the partition were images of the sun and the moon, golden and white. A hole gaped between them like a giant, empty niche, giving upon the eternal night of inner earth.

There was a flight of steps running down to a crypt beneath the altar. An enthroned skeleton-king guarded the vestibule to the city of the dead that lay beyond. His gold-coin eyes glittered in the dark. I saw that and left the temple.

It didn’t take long to make my way up to the cupola of the dome and reassemble my flyer. Soon I was in the air again.

*          *          *          *          *

The desert went on as before, except that the wells had been left behind for good. There were no songlines in the air, nor any that I could discern below. But I told myself that this was no time for songlines.

After two days I neared a mountain-wall running from north to south before me. Another day carried me to the foothills. Wrinkled knolls of loose dirty white and pale blue-green earth sloped up to the rampart. The sharp peaks shivered in the air of the baking hilltops. Their knees wore an earthy panoply of white, orange, pale yellow, salmon, black, and gray-green, with rounded roots all scored by deep folds swelling out like heaps of huge, huddled behemothim.

I alit high in the crumbling land. It was evening. The mountains threw a blue-black cloak across the landscape, beyond which the sun-brilliant vermilion flats stretched beneath a sky of verdigris. The Pillar was a tiny irregularity on the smooth rim of the silent earth.

*          *          *          *          *

It took days to get through the range. But I was in less of a hurry now, for there were running streams in the mountains.

Late one afternoon I came over a barren pass into a valley that sloped down to the west. The basin held a shallow lake, a mirror framed with green rushes. The blue horizon was still mostly hidden, but there were clouds in the distance.

I made camp that night on a saddle that swept up to a last sentinel of the range. The peak blocked the view of the land of the sun’s setting. That was how I wanted it. I didn’t know what I would see beyond it; I didn’t want to sleep knowing what was there.

During the night I dreamed a dream. I was walking over the plain of Arras, but it was green, carpeted with soft mosses and dotted with purple pernath groves. The Pillar, no longer bleached and pitted, was like a prism of black obsidian with a snow-dusted crown. The dome of the sky was a deep azure like velvet and sprinkled with stars. A song without words danced around my ears. It was a strain I often hear in my dreams, always with a vision of earth more big with meaning and joy than our own.

Suddenly an aspiration took hold of me. I leaped into the air, laid hold of heaven, and pulled myself through, thrusting the roof tiles aside and emerging into a palace of white light. My grandfather, Brandobrabdas, was there. We kissed one another, laughing.

And then I awoke. The blue that precedes dawn lay over the earth. I sat up and blinked, trying to treasure the dream. It flowed from my mind, though, leaving only the memory of a feeling, until something recalled it many weeks later.

Soon I took to the air again, following a valley that curved around the mountain’s base. It joined a rift that ran parallel to the range from north to south. Beyond that was a lower rampart wreathed in damp clouds. Waterfalls fell down it like veils of white gauze. The floor of the canyon was filled with a dusky forest of moss-trees like giant vegetables with pale, herbaceous trunks.

I followed the rift northward. A great gorge opened on my left, and I wheeled into it to wind my way through the lower range. As I came over the saddle of the pass I saw a sight that almost killed me, for my heart rose into my mouth and I forgot to keep driving my wings. I recovered, banked to the right, and mounted up to a high half-dome. There I alit, leaped to the cliff’s brink, and crouched like a carved grotesque, looking over the lowlands.

Beyond a gulf of shadow, beneath a shroud of smog, lit infernally from below like a nightmare city of hell, there stretched a stupendous jungle of glittering towers, with streets that teemed like glowing rivers of light, curving out of sight along canyons of stone and steel and glass.

It was a crushing vision. I turned to the east like someone looking away from a bonfire to rest a heat-strained visage. There, low down between two rough mountain-teeth, was the crescent moon, thin as a nail-paring, with horns turned up to the pale, starry vault. Centered just above it was Mirya, the harbinger of general illumination, a pendent jewel resplendent with the rays of the approaching sun.

The portent was swallowed up by the growing light. I sat down on the cliff edge and set my face to the west. The lowlands became a counterpane of purple-green shadow crisscrossed by gleaming silver. The towers above them flushed, first rose, then orange, and then became a uniform yellowed white. Their pinnacles were wreathed in dingy vapors that spread out like a blanket between two layers of air. The breeze that blew from the marshes was thick with rot.

Daybreak was heralded in the city by a terrifying din of gongs and horns. It was a menacing invitation to enter. There was nothing to do but accept.

Part I

5 Enoch

Thinking it unwise to approach the city from the air until I knew what manner of people dwelt there, I took my odonatopter apart and hid the pieces in the ravine behind the half-dome. Then, with my scrip over my shoulder and my hand on my sword’s hilt, I set off down the defile.

It curved around the mountain, east and south, growing ever deeper as it dropped toward the canyon. At its foot a heap of mossy boulders poured out into a glade carpeted with pink, dewy lichens. Pernathim towered on every side, their stems pale and scaly, branching high above into umbrellas of soft boughs and livid leaves. The air was moist and chilly and full of the smell of damp earth and growing things.

I circled the clearing and set out into the forest. There I struck a path that followed a stream. Soon the sun’s rays broke through the canopy behind me, setting the undergrowth on fire.

There were jade cups lined with vermilion hair, lichen-bushes with wiry yellow-white tentacles, giant purple-green fiddleheads, blue-green bifurcating mosses, scarlet spearheads and pale orange parasols waving on slender stalks. It was a delicate bifrostian world. I walked lightly.

After a few stades I came to a long pool. Sunbeams shot into the water and filtered through the swaying canopy. Passing in and out of the shifting shadows were lithe creatures with long, pale bodies and red-feathered gills. The pond narrowed to a brook again at the far end and went tumbling down the slope through green caverns.

The canyon floor leveled out. The stream became a quagmire that seeped into a long swamp. The view expanded.

There were thickets of giant scouring rushes and copses of pale green ynathim with scaly stems and tufted heads. The air was thick and heavy and full of the drowsy hum of the huge dragonflies looping and dodging over the water. Armor-faced efts were flushed from their coverts as I picked my way along the bank. Horsetails showered me with warm dewdrops, soaking my sandals, my breechclout, and my harness.

The canyon walls ended in shaggy shoulders at the mouth of the valley. There the range fell abruptly into the wetland beyond. A pool ran along the foot of the faultline as far as I could see. Beyond it was an earthen causeway.

I made for a plank laid across the pool, but froze as I set foot on it. Two white-skinned man-shapes with enormous round heads were sitting on the opposite slope.

*          *          *          *          *

Then, all of a sudden, they began to laugh. I watched them without comprehension, fingering the pommel of my sword. I saw now that what I had taken for skin was only white gauze wrapped around their limbs and their broad, conical hats. Their faces were invisible. One of them was short and scrawny; the other was of giant proportions.

They were still laughing. “We are laughing at
you!
” the small one said.

“I know,” I replied. “I’m wondering why.” That only made them laugh harder. “Will you let me cross your bridge?”

“Gods of dung! It is not
our
bridge!” the small one exclaimed. But the big one had already gotten to his feet. He bounced out along the plank, swinging a mallet. “Come along, little man,” he rumbled in a voice like gongs and waterfalls. I drew my sword and stepped out to meet him.

“Where did you get that thing?” screeched the little one. “What is it? Bronze?”

“This is the sword of my fathers.”

“And a lot of them you’ve had, by the looks of it,” the big one growled. “This, my friend, is iron. If you want to go far in life, carry iron.”

“Stop fooling around, Gehud,” said his mate. “Crush his skull or whatever it is you want to do and we’ll get to work. It’s time now.”

Gehud roared and swung his mallet. I slipped aside and sent him flying head-foremost into the putrid water with a slap of my sword’s flat. Gas bubbles rose to the surface. Gehud came up with them, sputtering like a swamp monster.

I leaped to the far bank and tore the small one’s hat off, revealing a pallid face and large, pink eyes that smarted in the sunlight. I boxed him in the side of the head with my fisted sword hand. Now they were both in the pool.

I looked down at them. “I never have spilled a man’s blood,” I said, “but I will if I have to. What are your names?”

“Mine’s Maruch,” the little one whined, trying to smile. He was missing his four upper front teeth, so that his canines looked like fangs. “What do you want from us?”

“Nothing. I just wanted to cross, and now I have. Is this how you treat every stranger?”

“No,” said Gehud, “just the freaks.”

“Tell me something.”

“Yes, anything,” said Maruch. He was more careful to be polite, being with reach of Deinothax.

I waved my sword at the western sky. “A while ago I looked out from a high place and saw a palace set among the stars. Which of you knows the way there?”

“Oh, I see!” said Gehud, nodding. “He’s a born Narvene! That explains everything.” He tapped his head.

“Quiet!” hissed March. Then, to me: “You mean the Hanging Gardens? Now what would you want there?”

“I seek the medicine of immortality, the elixir to restore life to dead bones. Does such a thing exist? Do you know?”

Gehud laughed. Maruch didn’t laugh. His wide eyes stayed on Deinothax. “No, friend,” he said. “I wouldn’t know about that. We’re just helots. You’d better try the phylites, the great ones of Enoch.” He gestured vaguely toward the line of towers.

“Is that the city’s name?”

They were both wide-eyed now. “You really didn’t know that,” said Maruch, “did you, Bronze?”

“As I said, I’m a stranger. Farewell.” I slid my sword into its place at my side and backed up the bank. The two men remained where they were.

The swamp, I saw, continued on the far side, but the view was blocked by a patty of huge horsetails like gigantic green bottle-brushes topped with violet strobili. The causeway ran between field and forest, with intersections every stade or so where tracks diverged at right angles.

I made my way to the nearest division. Every now and then I glanced back, but the helots were just sitting in the water, waiting for me to be gone. I turned down the intersecting causeway. Soon the corner of the field cut them off from view.

The track ran clear to the city between two rows of fields. Midway down it I passed a big green-black building standing knee-deep in the water, surrounded by horsetails. Something inside it roared like a bottled daemon. It was crowned with jets of quivering air.

The two helots were wading toward it on the other side. Maruch had replaced his hat. I slipped away before they saw me.

*          *          *          *          *

The causeway ended at another that ran along the inner edge of the belt. The city began a stone’s throw away.

Its foundation rose like a cliff out of the water, a wall of shattered masonry with iron beams sticking out like the ribs of a crushed victim, all stained with rust-streaks like dried blood and littered with heaps of trash. Braided viaducts ran its length, borne on pylons whose feet were sunk deep in the putrid water. Rail-cars moved along them with screeches and hisses that drifted down to the swamp.

I crossed a metal footbridge suspended from iron posts. On the far side a tunnel continued straight ahead into the pile, while rusty stairs climbed to a place where one of the viaducts branched off into the city over a dark dead end. The breath of the tunnel was humid and rank, so I chose the stairs.

Higher and higher I went, back and forth around the corner of a tower. Soon I could see clear over the wetlands to the moss-forest and the peaks piled one behind another to the sky.

There was a chained gate at the top. A low rumble came from the other side. I crept up and put my eye to a chink, and saw a grated walkway that ran along the tracks into the city. It was crowded with people.

For a long time I stood there, transfixed by the torrent of detail. For they were graceful, the great ones of Enoch, their limbs swathed in flowing silk, their skin covered with ornate tattoos or dyed blue or saffron or pink, their cheeks pierced by delicate, ruby-hung chains. Some bore tusks or horns. Others loped on long, splayed toes. But each was beautiful, flawless in his or her own way. They reminded me somehow of the clay figures on my uncle’s chessboard; perhaps it was their eyes, which were large yet unseeing, as though shuttered from within.

There are some who hesitate over every decision. I am not one of them. For me, to see a branching of ways is to pick one and dash down it, dealing with whatever comes. So I climbed the gate and leaped over.

The people closest to me swerved and passed by. No one spoke to me or even looked at me. I was like a stone cast into a swift, shallow stream.

I went up to a woman with pale pink hair. “I’m a stranger here,” I began. She seemed not to see me. I tried the man behind her: “I looked out from a high place,” I said. Again I was rebuffed.

I was in the middle of the walkway now, with people rushing past on every side. I was invisible to them. If they had taken any action at all I would have picked my way as seemed best, but as it was I didn’t know what to do. So I climbed back over the gate and descended to the platform.

Maruch and Gehud were coming along the causeway. “Dung gods!” cried Maruch. “What is it, my friend?”

“No one sees me here.”

“
Aiee!
That’s what I was just saying to Gehud! ‘We’d better go see how he’s doing,’ I said. ‘Those phylites, they might not be too helpful.’“

“I don’t understand,” I said. I met the helots on the bridge.

“It’s just how they are, my friend,” said Maruch. “Each belongs to his own phyle. Phylites from different phyles don’t notice each other, except in the Cheiropt.”

“Cheiropt? What’s the Cheiropt?”

“The Cheiropt—why, the Cheiropt is everywhere. It’s everything.”

“How am I to obtain their help if they won’t notice me?”

“I was just coming to that. Gehud and I, we’re only simple helots, but we know people. We have a friend who might be able to help you get across to Bel.” He patted my arm in a friendly way.

“What is Bel?”

“Bel is the tower in the middle of Tethys, the sea. It’s how you get to Narva.”

I considered the offer. “Very well,” I said at length. “Thank you. Lead the way.”

“Wonderful, wonderful!” cried Maruch, cracking his knuckles with glee. He went past me with Gehud stalking behind. Together they entered the mouth of the tunnel.

I hung back, reluctant to follow. The air coming out of the opening was like foul breath. “Wait,” I said.

The helots turned. Maruch smiled. “What is it, my friend?”

“Do we have to go down there?”

“Hela is where we live. Hela is where our friend lives.”

“Do the songlines run through it?”

Gehud muttered under his breath. Maruch kicked him. “Indeed they do. Of course, if you don’t want our help…”

“No, I’ll come,” I said. The helots turned, and I followed them into the tunnel. I heard a muffled explosion somewhere out in the marshes. Sirens started to go off, but the sound was swiftly muted as we went down the shaft.

“What is all that?” I asked.

“That? Oh, that’s some accident. Don’t worry about it, Bronze. Someone will come take care of it soon.”

Passages began to branch off in every direction. There were narrow lanes lined with lime-encrusted brick, vast echoing crypts and vaults. Yellow lights trembled, troubling the gloom. The air was heavy with the smells of rotten mortar and escaped gas.

“What is this place?” I whispered, half to myself.

“It is Hela,” said Maruch.

“Did your people build all this?”

“Hela is Old Enoch. The phylites pile the city higher and higher. When they want a new building, they knock down an old one and fill it in and build on top of it. Then helots come along and find parts that aren’t filled, or dig out parts that are.”

Our way led down. It was like being in the belly of a behemoth. Gas pipes murmured along old alleys like clotted arteries. Dynamos thundered in the gloom, shooting jets of steam. The cavernous cloaca roared behind thick walls.

We began to pass solitary helots, all pallid and pink-eyed like Maruch. It was a tenement district, but there were few people abroad. “Do helots sleep during the day?” I asked.

“Mostly,” said Maruch. “They work the gas fields at night. When they have to go out in the sun, they wrap themselves up like this.”

We turned from the main byways into a labyrinth of narrow corridors. At last we came to a metal door in a dead-end passage. Maruch rapped on it. A shutter slid open, then closed. A bolt shot back and the door swung inward. I followed my guides inside. The doorkeeper kept hidden in shadow.

We went down a little flight of steps and through another door into a square room lined with benches. There was a long, tall table without chairs in the middle, and an iron gate on one side. Gehud swung it open, revealing a small cell with a solid metal door in the far wall.

“You sit in there and wait,” said Maruch. “We’ll go around the far side to let you through.” I went in and sat. Gehud closed the gate and locked it. They both vanished.

They were gone a long time. Despair settled on my shoulders. I read for songlines, but there were none. Enoch had obliterated them. I was unmoored, spinning helplessly through space.

There was a buzz and a loud click. The metal door swung open, revealing a dank, tiled room and an identical door in the opposite wall. That door swung open, too. I went through them both.

I was at the bottom of a large octagonal pit. The walls and floor were tiled with dirty green and white tiles, stained with mildew and rust and blood. Pipes stuck out from six of the walls, three on each side. There was a big gate in the seventh, opposite the door through which I had come. A drain yawned in the middle of the floor. Bright lights hung down from an unseen ceiling.

“Well, was I lying?” came Maruch’s wheedle, drifting down out of the blackness beyond the lip of the pit.

“You dragged me out of bed for that?”—an old woman’s voice—“Where did you find him?”

“He was wandering around out beyond the fields. Sheol knows where he came from. A regular hatchling, he is! They don’t make them like that anymore.”

“Five rods,” the woman said shortly. Her voice was like someone throwing gravel on a metal roof.

“Five! Five rods! And him armed and dangerous! Almost killed the two of us. Probably not even completely human. No, no. Fifty would be more like it. It’s only a fraction of the profit you’ll turn.”

“Ten rods.”

“Ten! Ten rods!”

I ignored the argument. I was pacing the pit like a caged animal indeed. With a sudden resolve I tensed and sprang, swung myself up to a pipe, and leaped again, grasping the edge of the pit with my fingers. I hung there, trying to make good my purchase and scramble over.

The old woman swore. Maruch shrieked. Gehud simply strode up, grasped my wrists, and tossed me off.

I landed on my back, stunned. A hissing noise filled my ears. A sickly-sweet smell like vomit invaded my nostrils.

“Twenty,” the old woman said. Her voice sounded like it was coming down a long, long tube.

“Sold,” cried Maruch. But I scarcely heard him. I was already drifting off into a place without dreams.